“…haunting and strangely familiar music – a soundtrack for the kind of puzzling dream which leaves you sitting awake in the middle of the night…”
—The New Yorker
“Trains cut across the landscape and through the story’s layers of history, and Mark Orton’s score, with its eerie/classical tinges, potently connects the eras and genres. ”
—The Hollywood Reporter
“Starewicz’s shorts, created in the early years of the 20th century, are charming in their dotty, sweetly surreal old-worldliness, a sensation matched by the wonderfully mercurial scores written by the Tin Hat Quartet. Dreamily eclectic, the music is a deft soup of American folk melodies with middle-European hamishness, the high modernism of Stravinsky and Schoenberg with the brash, wise-guy jazz of Looney Tunes composer Carl Stalling and Raymond Scott. Familiar sounds bubble up and tickle the ear, then transmute into something witty, rich and strange.”
—Variety
“In a just world, Willie Nelson’s tenderly plangent vocal and the tune’s (“Willow Weep for Me”) pitch-perfect, tumbleweeds-tumbling-inthe-breeze arrangement by Tin Hat guitarist Mark Orton would resonate from radios across the country.”
—Billboard Magazine
“Orton’s score, haunting and lovely, is a perfect match to the gorgeous, sparse black and white landscape so vividly captured in the film. The music feels like a character itself—his guitar (among other instruments) accentuates the rural plains of Payne’s moving father/son road trip movie….”
—The Credits
“…potent image-inducing music that unleashes the listener’s inner cinematographer.”
—San Francisco Metropolitan
“Those numb to the blips and bloops of the digital age will welcome the infectious acoustica of the classically trained, jazz-honed Tin Hat Trio…a circus of soul, mingling Left Bank jazz with Gypsy honky-tonk, skewed tango with postmodern classicism…it’s music of Old World depth delivered with New World brio….the sound of the other Young America.”
—Billboard Magazine
“…crackles with the improvisational savvy of jazz, but it is unclassifiable – like notes from some dusty heartland attic, restored and polished to a high sheen…a marvel of intimate chemistry and resourceful orchestration.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Interweaving Old World Europe with post-modern America, south-of-the-border sensuality with concert-hall propriety, and odd-metered syncopation with deeply soulful grooves, the ensemble has created an original American ethnic music of its own device.”
—The New York Press
“(Tin Hat Trio) have created something warm, welcoming and entirely unique through their melding of the avant-garde with something much more familiar…”
—Rolling Stone
“…this remarkable quintet of multi-instrumentalists create a series of measured vignettes that brilliantly mix the familiar with the bizarre. Founder members Carla Kihlstedt – fulsomely melodic on violin – and ultra-sharp rhythm guitarist Mark Orton are here augmented by harp and an instrumental assortment that includes wheezy harmoniums, querulous trumpets and plaintive clarinets. Unhurried tempos add to an underlying feeling of uncertainty, creating a genuinely surrealist musical soundscape.”
—Financial Times, London
“…the evocative pleasures of a music that seems as if it lives – and has forever – down deep in the marrow of our bones, coaxed out in its haunting and ethereal glory by the inspired musicians of the Tin Hat Trio.. Listen to this CD three times through; in your sleep that night you’ll have dreams strange and old and wondrous… an odd, affecting, wonderful musical night.”
—The American Reporter
“An all-encompassing American tableau – with melodies both strange and beautiful.”
—Associated Press